Keep Your Liberal Nihilism Off Our LGB(T) Kids
A mini manifesto from your normally mild-mannered host
This will end up being part 1 of a three-part series because my editor’s response was so wonderful that I asked him to turn it into a kind of rebuttal/addendum. And then I ended up responding to a writer and pundit on Instagram about this very issue, which became part 3. Yes, there are real mental health concerns with LGBT kids. Is our response to it, our messaging about it, helping?
—LD
“Forty-five percent of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year,” reports the Trevor Project, a nonprofit ostensibly devoted to reducing such occurrences. That upon coming out, you are immediately vulnerable to killing yourself is a message young people are hearing relentlessly—mostly from activist organizations and adults that purport to support and protect LGBT young people. Adults, it should be noted, who grew up in much worse times, when everything from cross-dressing to marrying a same-sex loved one was illegal.